For our technology prowess, we still haven’t figured when to stop oversharing baby pictures — I know this, because I’m one of those people oversharing baby pictures. Much of the problem lies in every parent’s assumption that our baby is one of the cutest babies in the world, which is a false assumption, because mine is.
“When did Facebook become freaking preschool?” some of you grumble, saddened by all the pictures of babies clogging your feed that are not pictures of my baby.
Well, good news: A Chrome browser extension called Unbaby.me can remove all the pictures of babies on Facebook and replace them with dogs. What? Technology. No more babies, lots more dogs. The future is now.
According to the Los Angeles Times: “Once it is running, it will scan your Facebook feed for key words such as ‘cute,’ ‘adorable’ and ‘first birthday’ — trigger words that indicate a baby photo may be attached. You can also add your own key words. Then it replaces the offending baby photo with a different photo from an RSS feed of pictures.”
Those pictures can all be of dogs. Imagine, for every picture your friend of one summer 20 years ago posts of her baby who you hope to never meet (fingers crossed), you can instead get a picture of a Pug, along with the wistful line, “Baby removed.”
By default, the plug-in is set up to replace baby pictures with cats, but “it’s easy to change it to pugs, or girls, or whatever you’re into,” according to the description.
The plug-in is the work of three New Yorkers — Yvonne Cheng, Chris Baker, and Pete Marquis — who were sick of looking at pictures of babies on Facebook (they never saw my baby) and decided to replace them with pictures of dogs, cats, or whatever you want, by creating a browser plug-in. This is the kind of thing that happens nowadays.
“We were having drinks one night after work and were joking around about how Facebook is just lousy with babies, and wouldn’t it be funny if you could replace all those photos with cats,” Cheng said to the Los Angeles Times.
NOTE: Cheng has not seen my baby.
“Personally, I don’t hate babies. I love babies,” Cheng said, we like to think languidly, while sipping a spritzer of some sort in a bar at 4 in the afternoon, because she does not have a baby and can do things like create browser plug-ins while half-tossed on Carlo Rossi. “But I do get tired of looking at babies.”
(Cheng has not seen my baby.)
